OPINION Pain Points
“A challenge exists in providing what is still perceived as a personal service where the customer is king.”
Carl Boraman, Senior VP - Strategic Alliances, Tollring
Soothing the Hurt
Ian Bevington, Marketing
We asked channel players what they considered to be the biggest pain points today in call and contact centres
Manager at Oak Innovation,
points to managing quality as
a pain point in contact centres.
“As businesses move to
ecommerce multimedia
interaction, they may be judged
by their weakest channel.
When it comes to voice,
those rare opportunities to
talk need to be exceptional.
Today, few organisations
make eective use of tools
like workforce management,
speech analytics and sentiment
analysis to manage the quality
of conversations eectively. It’s
about providing individuals and
teams with the information they
need to work more eectively.
Bad new travels fast in an
online world. e smallest
customer dispute can be shared
on social media and damage
reputation. Speedy problem
resolution is key. Organisations
need to monitor social media
channels, prove who said what,
get to the truth and resolve
disputes before they escalate into
more serious and costly cases.”
Customer expectations are
a problem according to Carl
Boraman at Tollring.
“A challenge exists in
providing what is still perceived
as a personal service where the
customer is king. is includes
giving the customer the ability
to contact you in their preferred
medium, showing them that
their business is important to
you and giving agents easy access
to the information they need to
be able to facilitate a successful
interaction.
is allows expectations to
be properly set as well as serving
as the foundation for KPIs,
SLAs and other metrics that
allow the contact centre to be
managed eectively. is task
can be made much easier with
the right technology in place –
©REDPIXEL-stock.adobe.com
particularly where insight from
across the business can be used
to feed into these processes.”
Gary Bennett, VP Sales
EMEA at Enghouse Interactive
says that lack of planning
around the customer journey
presents problems.
“Businesses have oered their
customers a range of dierent
channels through which to
interact - but they have generally
not looked at the situation
holistically. ey haven’t
mapped out an optimised
customer journey. As a result,
customers are often interacting
with them through channels
that are poorly matched to what
they are looking to achieve.
at ultimately leads to
longer journey times with higher
costs and levels of friction. It
also leads to agent and employee
dissatisfaction because sta
are having to undergo the
stressful process of wrestling
with dierent systems and
information types and build up
a picture of what is going on.
Organisations increasingly
need to rethink their whole
customer service culture – and
that often means moving away
from the existing functional
silos that exist within the
business. Instead with the
most straightforward, routine
enquiries increasingly solved
by self-service, businesses are
looking to draw on skills and
expertise held more widely by
sta across the organisation
to answer more complex or
specialist enquiries. at requires
an agile connected infrastructure
capable of supporting interaction
with sta in the middle and back
oce; and a exible business
culture able to empower sta
to make decisions that meet
customer needs.”
Tim Mercer, CEO at Vapour
Cloud believes the biggest pain
point for some contact centres
is, paradoxically, that they feel
pain free.
“ey’re still operating under
the mindset that they’re driving
the customer agenda. ey’re
not. But, slowly, in every sector,
there’ll be a contact centre
that is listening to customer
requirements and adapting
accordingly – look at BetFred in
the bookmaking sector!
Legacy infrastructures
make it dicult to enable
multichannel, unied comms,
never mind PCI compliant call
recordings, remote working and
data-rich contact centre analysis.
But the longer organisations try
to cope with the voice platforms
they have, the more they’ll get
left behind.”
Edward Wineld, UK Sales
Director at Content Guru,
makes a top-level observation
when he says that underpinning
all of these pain points, is the
integration of customer and
organisational data into contact
centre infrastructure.
“Often analytics and
security are separate modules
to customer care, regarded as
bolt-ons or afterthoughts to the
core contact centre solution.
is however creates siloes
of data and raises questions
surrounding data protection.
Organisations must interweave
internal infrastructure with
customer care, eectively using
big data to drive business
decisions and ensuring that
data remains secure, with PCIcompliance
as standard.”
50 | Comms Business Magazine | February 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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